1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to seismic monitoring or sensing; and more particularly relates to seismic monitoring or sensing using a reconfigurable array.
2. Description of Related Art
A seismic system having distributed selectable fiber optic sensors is known in the art. The seismic system has an optical fiber with fiber optic grating based sensors distributed along a borehole of a well. Each fiber optic grating based sensor has a different wavelength for interrogating a separate fiber optic grating based sensor. The seismic system is not reconfigurable for looking at different groups of fiber optic grating based sensors distributed along a borehole of a well.
Moreover, seismic sensing systems having a hydrophone or geophone array are known that are "ganged" together in groups, also known as levels. This is done for redundancy and to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N). This grouping creates a spatial length over which a seismic measurement can be made. Once hard-wired into a group and deployed, it is not feasible to interrogate the individual elements of the group. To look at an array with a higher spatial resolution capability, one would need to access these separate elements. In a typical seismic survey, a seismic array is defined and built prior to installation. One disadvantage of the related art is that once deployed it is not possible to reconfigure the array.